


Careless in our Summer Clothes

by liadan14



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Abusive Neil Hargrove, Canon Compliant, Domestic Violence, F/M, Spoilers Season 3, Threatened Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 01:46:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19819996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Max has this fantasy that she can reopen the gate, just for a minute, just a little crack, just enough to pull a magically restored Billy back through. Because then, someone else would be getting his dad's attention.





	Careless in our Summer Clothes

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I was just really disappointed that Season 3 didn't tackle Billy and Max's relationship and family situation any more thoroughly. I kept wishing there was more to show how Max deals with a confusing and terrible loss, especially since she's now basically alone in an abusive household. I though there was a lot there. Not to say I didn't love the season - I did - I was just kind of hoping the Billy and Max relationship would get more depth and also that Will would get more to do. (The background story that doesn't happen in this story is, Will moves to a big city and suddenly he's not weird anymore and he gets to be okay being himself, and also he and El make great siblings and like to use shopping as a way to figure out who they are).
> 
> Major content warnings: abuse, both mental and physical. Max herself is mostly under psychological threat, Billy and Susan are under a more physical threat. Max as I see her here is struggling with survivors' guilt, regular guilt and also depression as a result of her family situation. There is no rape, and it's not even really implied, but a lot of the way Neil treats Max here is based around her body and it could definitely be read as threatened sexual violence.

Max gets along with her stepdad. They didn’t have the most auspicious start - he had thought she was cute, when he and her mom first met, and told her as much. Max has never been all that interested in being cute, and she’d been pretty rude about it. He was skeptical of her interest in skateboarding, but ultimately left that up to her mom, and Max’s mom was cool about it. She wasn’t thrilled about how strict he was, or with the way he talked to her mom, but it was mostly just fine.

Until she runs away before the move to Hawkins, that is, and gets herself firmly on his radar. The whole drive to Hawkins is a verbal beating about how Max is nowhere near feminine enough and doesn’t respect her elders.

Max’s mom is careful to keep Max dressed in overalls, in pants and loose t-shirts, and to give her brightly colored scrunchies and not let her anywhere near the makeup aisle as soon as they get to Hawkins. 

It’s a relief to Max, at first. She’s never been all that interested in being super girly to begin with, and most of her hobbies situate her squarely on the tomboy spectrum. So, no pressure to dress up like someone she’s not reads like a net positive in her book. She lets the move to Hawkins slide, gets good grades and puts her hair in pigtails and colorful clips and Neil calls her cute. It’s fine.

She’s still careful, though, not stupid. 

The first time she met up with the boys after…well, after everything, she made sure it was at Mike’s house. Mike, with his two sisters and incredibly WASP-y parents, read as acceptable. So does the fact that El is already there, and Max won’t be alone with a boy. Neil gets to talking with Mike’s dad about who to hire around town to clean the gutters, and Max gets to duck down into the basement, dragging El with her before she can say anything weird. 

Max tells Mike and El she’s sorry, her parents are weird and like to be everywhere early.

She tells Dustin the same thing when Neil drops her off there. He doesn’t linger – single moms, let alone single moms as eccentric as Dustin’s, are not his thing, but she’s still on the radar as acceptable.

Max never lets him drive her to the Sinclairs. She catches a ride with someone else, or takes her skateboard or her bike if the weather’s good enough. 

After a couple months, Susan has met the Sinclairs when picking Max up, and Neil knows they exist, but neither of them register Lucas as in any way a special friend of Max’s. Lucas, thankfully, has never even asked about meeting them properly. Max is fine. She can handle this.

-

When Billy dies, it guts Max. She sobs until her stomach turns from it, pukes in the mall trashcan while a paramedic puts a shock blanket around her shoulders. 

Billy was never what Max would call a good stepbrother. He wasn’t interested in comics or arcade games, and he liked to threaten her with beating up one of her friends. She would taunt back that he was so afraid of ruining his pretty boy face he’d beat up a middle schooler.

They were both lying, and they both knew it. 

There was a reason Billy took lifeguarding jobs in the summer and played basketball at school. Neil’s a bully, but he’s a smart bully, and he never went for patches of skin that would be on show. Being in swimming trunks all day kept most of Billy’s body safe, but that didn’t stop Neil from reaching for a belt, leaving Billy shifting uncomfortably on his seat all day by the pool.

Max learned first aid from skateboarding and skinning her knees, but she learned to use it from sneaking over to Billy’s bathroom when Neil had had a rough day at work, or Billy had said the wrong thing at dinner, or Billy just breathed the wrong way. The first winter in Hawkins, she’d learned to rub arnica gel into the worst bruises, to cool cigarette burns on his thighs, to carefully pluck shards of a broken wine glass out of Billy’s arm and bandage up the mess it left behind.

Billy never said thank you, and Max never said she was welcome.

But Billy also never told his father about Lucas. He never said a word about Steve Harrington hanging out with her and the guys. He didn’t say anything about that night at the Byers’ house.

The bottom line is this: Billy treated her like shit, but if he hadn’t, Max would never have known to keep Lucas as secret as she does. Even before she was aware that he was protecting her, she’d copied his aggressive, I-don’t-give-a-fuck way of talking to strangers, keeping herself insulated. Even before she was aware that he was protecting her, she’d wanted to seem like he seemed: untouchable.

Neil and her mom come to the mall together. Her mom’s face is ashen and streaked with tears when she sees the body bag. Neil barely reacts. His hands shake. It takes everything in Max not to storm up to him, to get in his face and tell him yeah, he didn’t get to kill his own son, something else got there first, ain’t that a shame.

She doesn’t.

She wants to beg Joyce Byers to take her home, too, to let her stay the night by El’s side and not have to face this yet.

She doesn’t.

She wants to run back into the mall, to open the damn gate and slide through to the other side, where no one can find her.

She doesn’t.

-

Life is worse without Billy in it. Those first weeks in Hawkins, Max had been sure that was an impossibility, with Billy terrorizing her every time they were alone together. She was wrong.

Neil has a laser focus. Now that Billy’s gone, it’s mostly on Max’s mom, and Max tries to be invisible. She keeps her scrunchies. She keeps her skateboard, her loose, low-rise, unfashionable jeans and colorful hoodies. She keeps her good grades. She leaves her radio on so low that Dustin regularly bitches her out for being hard to hear. 

It doesn’t stop Neil from noticing her enough.

He’ll say, “that’s a nice color on you, Maxine,” when she dares to wear something not neon yellow or green.

He’ll say, “your hair looks lovely today, Maxine,” when she combs it out and leaves it loose.

He’ll say, “I hope you aren’t planning on staying out late again, Maxine,” when she heads for the door on a weekend day.

Every time, her heart catches in her throat, and every time she forces a smile and says “thank you” or “I won’t”. She’s lying.

But it’s her mom who takes the worst of it. It’s her mom who gets in trouble when she gets back late from work, or spends too much money on groceries. It’s her mom who’s getting cigarette burns and bruises now, and Max can’t just sneak into her mom’s bathroom and make them better because her mom’s bathroom is Neil’s bathroom. 

It’s her mom who takes the fall when Max forgets the time and comes home a half-hour late. 

“Do you think,” Max asks, whisper-thin and quiet on the radio, “that Billy might be alive? Y’know…there?”

“I don’t know,” Will says. “I mean, he did die on this side, we saw it.” Will means well, but he can’t disguise the doubt in his voice.

“I wish I could check,” El says glumly. “But I can’t access anything anymore.”

The gate is shut. Max knows this. El losing her powers proves it more than anything. She still has this dream. This little fantasy, where she manages to pry open a door, just long enough to drag Billy through it.

“He was pretty mean to you,” Will says. “I mean, it’s sad that he’s dead, but he did nearly kill Steve that one time and he wasn’t even flayed then.”

“Yeah,” Max says. “Yeah, you guys are right.” She asks them about their new school and tunes out while they talk about it, thinking instead.

She has this fantasy where she can drag Billy back from the void, so he can take Neil’s attention again, so he can be bruised and hurting again, because he deserves it more than her mom.

-

No one got mad at Joyce when she said they were moving. That is how she knew it was the right choice to make: Jonathan, who she knows is miserable without Nancy, didn’t protest it. Eleven, who radios Mike every night, didn’t protest it. Will, who has been inseparably tied to that group of boys since elementary school, didn’t protest it. Even Mike, who Joyce had fully expected to fly off the handle, didn’t protest it. They all knew it was for the best.

El and Will make really good siblings. Jonathan hates how much they make really good siblings. It’s like he went from having one traumatized, otherworldly pain in the ass to having two, and they gang up on him all the time. 

Only he doesn’t hate it at all and he hasn’t seen Will look so relaxed in his own skin for years.

Eleven steals the hot water in the mornings. Joyce showed her how to use mascara and blush, and she loves it. She wears bright colors, and crazy patterns, and she and Joyce do their nails while they watch TV, and maybe Joyce has missed having a girl around the house, because she delights in teaching El everything her sons don’t necessarily care about.

Jonathan is fine with this; it gives him more time to take sad, bleak photos of Wisconsin to send to Nancy.

On the upside, Joyce hired on as assistant manager at a Staples in Madison, and while the rent’s a lot more than in Hawkins, she’s also earning enough to send Will and Eleven to the mall every now and again with a ten dollar bill for each of them. She had kind of thought neither of them would ever set foot in another mall again, but they beg her for two straight weeks until she sends them off with strict orders to be back by five.

She’s not surprised when the first three months’ worth of cash goes in for radio equipment.

She’s very surprised when, in January, Will comes back from the mall with a haircut. He must have saved up for it, because there’s no way it cost him ten bucks to get something that stylish, but she also has to admit it looks a lot better than her old standard: Putting the mid-size Pyrex bowl over his head and chopping around the sides.

Most of El’s money goes out the window for clothes. Joyce is pretty sure she has a whole Gap living in her closet, but Joyce gets it. El spent most of her life in hospital gowns, she should get to choose a new identity. It’s pretty normal teenage girl behavior. 

She’s also a little surprised that Mike and Nancy keep their promised visits – Thanksgiving and Easter – to the day. Dustin even tags along for Easter.

“What about the rest of the gang, huh?” She asks, closing the fridge door with her hip as she carries all the Easter eggs over to the table. “I was expecting the full party here.”

Mike shakes his head around a full mouth. “Max’s family is weird about her going places alone. After Billy. Lucas stayed to keep her company”

Everyone is silent for a moment, but the food wins out over somberness in the end.

-

It’s a shock when Max sees El for the first time in a year over summer vacation. Her hair’s grown out even more and she’s learned to curl and straighten it depending on her mood. She wears dresses that dip in the waist and flare out, like Nancy used to, and short shorts and patterned tops. She wears make-up.

Max is still wearing the same cut-offs and striped t-shirts as last year. Her hair is a frizzy mess in a high ponytail.

She laughs and tells El she’s missed her and tries not to cry.

She tags along on mall runs and claims she has no money to buy herself new clothes with. It only stings a little when El doesn’t notice and tries on each new piece of clothing for Will and Max to judge. 

“Will’s the best at picking clothes,” she says, and Will’s ears go a little red but he grins. He even offers to help Max pick something out that will “wow” Lucas, even though he’s blushing like crazy. She thanks him but turns it down.

The mall has an arcade, and at least they all still enjoy hanging out there. Max is careful to never have too much cash on her so no one calls her lie about not being able to afford clothes into question, but it means she’s stuck watching Dustin play half the night instead of playing herself.

She never gets home too late anymore.

Last summer, she left Dustin and Will alone with the radio, dragging Lucas along so they could have a few minutes to make out before she had to leave, and she didn’t care when she was a few minutes late. 

This summer, she leaves on time.

Max hasn’t gotten pissed and dumped Lucas in a few months. It’s the longest they’ve ever made it, actually – a solid five-month stretch since January. She’s not entirely sure why he doesn’t get sick of her. She’s almost sixteen, and her legs have gotten so long she changes into jeans in the bushes by the road before she goes back home because she’s scared her shorts are too short. Her t-shirts are just barely hiding where she’s gotten curvier than she used to be, and she only ever wears sports bras to keep things flattened. There are dozens of girls in school who make more of an effort. There are dozens of girls in school who don’t have a ten PM curfew, or who don’t care about it if they do. There are dozens of girls in school who don’t flinch when a boy touches too much of their skin.

None of it helps. 

Neil notices her. 

“Maxine should really be dressing her age,” he says over breakfast, and her mom agrees instantly.

Max sticks it out another few weeks, but Neil’s hints get incessant, to the point he presses her up against the fridge when she tries to grab a slice of uncooked toast from the kitchen and bolt outside. 

“Maxine,” he says, his lower arm pressing her entire collarbone back against the fridge. “I told you I’d like you to dress nicer. Your mom took you shopping. What’s the problem, Maxine?”

She doesn’t answer. 

He pulls her to her room by her hair, dresses her in a short, dark blue skirt and a white blouse. He drags a brush brutally through her hair and she doesn’t scream. She says nothing.

Lucas tells her she looks pretty.

She says nothing.

By the time high school starts in the fall, Neil has thrown out her ill-fitting jeans, her washed-out T-shirts, her overalls. He appraises her outfit every morning. He’ll say, “doesn’t she look nice, Susan?” And Max’s mom will agree.

Max joins three different clubs to stay at school longer. 

Lucas tells her she looks pretty so often she starts to be able to stand hearing the words. 

She won’t let him kiss her at school. 

Either he remembers Billy coming after him with a vengeance two years ago, or he’s just genuinely trying to be respectful, but he doesn’t question her. Max still wakes up sweating some nights, imagining someone telling her mom about how she kissed Lucas at the Snow Ball. It would’ve been fine, two years ago. It’s not anymore.

She sneaks into Billy’s room, sometimes. It’s exactly how he left it. Neil did nothing but appropriate his weightlifting equipment.

She wonders if this is what he was trying to protect her from, if this is what he imagined, or if he just thought she’d be another punching bag for Neil.

She wonders what it was like, being Billy. If he actually believed the bullshit Neil told him, about gay people, about black people, about himself.

She’s strung so tight she barely notices time passing anymore. Classes have gotten harder; keeping her grades up is harder than it used to be. She keeps phasing out in English lit, not sure what she’s thinking about. 

When she gets a C, Neil grabs her by the neck, tells her that that’s not how his daughter should be behaving.

She studies harder. She sees the guys less.

She turns her radio off, paranoid they’ll hear her stepdad yelling down the line one night. 

-

Lucas asks Steve. He doesn’t know anyone else old enough to be helpful that he trusts.

“She hasn’t been acting like herself,” he tells Steve, sitting in the front seat of Steve’s car. He’s as tall as Steve is now, and he’s the last to be dropped off after the movies. Max wasn’t with them. “Y’know, she used to be…like, relaxed. She hasn’t skateboarded in months, and she used to hate wearing skirts.”

Steve shrugs. “High school is weird, man. Girls change. They get all into how they dress and act and stuff.”

Lucas shakes his head. “Not Max.”

Steve looks skeptical. 

“She hasn’t gotten mad at me in like a year, man.”

“Maybe you’re just getting better at not pissing her off.”

“Nope,” Lucas says. “That’s definitely not it. I don’t even know if she’s listening to me half the time. She barely even lets me say hi in public. And she never stays out late.”

“I mean, her parents are probably pretty shaken up about Billy,” Steve says, trying to be reasonable. “I guess they don’t want her staying out.”

Lucas shrugs, glum. “I guess. I don’t know her parents.”

Steve stares at him. “You’ve been dating this girl for what, two years? And you never met her parents?”

“I don’t think she wants me to,” he says. “She definitely goes out of her way to avoid them finding out about me. I think it’s ‘cause I’m black.”

Steve whistles. “That’s messed up.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Steve says, pulling up in front of the Sinclairs’ house. “You probably should just ask her.”

-

When Lucas asks her, Max bursts into tears. 

It’s really embarrassing.

She’s not a girl who cries a lot. Mostly, she cries when she’s really, really helplessly angry. She’s never been angry enough around Lucas to cry this much – he may have hurt her feelings, but she had had the upper hand in those fights. She’s never been vulnerable enough around Lucas to cry this much. Not even when Billy had them cornered at the Byers’ house.

He vaguely remembers her sobbing over Billy’s body, El pulling Max into her arms, but he’d been pulled away, first by paramedics and then by his own parents. He’d called her, later, on the radio, and she’d thanked him for calling. She’d said, “I don’t really wanna talk right now. Can you, can you just leave the radio on so I can hear you?”

He had.

She doesn’t even know how to explain herself. She can’t tell her boyfriend that her stepdad is dressing her up like a barbie doll. She can’t tell him he puts out cigarettes on her mom’s skin. What would he do? Call the police? She’d get taken away, like El almost did.

So Lucas talks instead. Tells her that watching her these last months has been like watching someone turn out all the lights in a house, one by one. That he misses going to the arcade, just the two of them, and letting her kick his ass. That he misses when she could get so angry she’d dump him over dinner and cool off fast enough to get back together in time for breakfast.

She just cries harder.

In the end, he doesn’t know what to do but to offer her a hug, and she stays there, in his arms, shuddering, for so long that he almost starts crying too.

It’s the first time she hasn’t flinched when he touches her sides, her waist.

-

When Billy’s been dead two years, Neil screws up. 

Susan is running away from him, up the stairs, and he yanks her arm so hard he dislocates her shoulder.

The nurses may have pretty strict rules about how many visitors can see a patient, but they do know what cigarette burns look like, and what fingerprint-shaped bruises mean, and what abuse looks like.

There’s a police detail in front of Susan’s room at the hospital, and only Max is allowed through it without showing an ID. Neil is over the state line and long gone. He left after dumping Susan out the side of his car like trash in front of the ER.

Susan tries to apologize.

“Don’t,” Max says.

Susan tries anyway. 

“He never hurt me,” Max says. She has a ring of bruises around her thigh that states otherwise, from when he grabbed her leg under the dinner table last week because she wasn’t being communicative enough about what she’d learned at school that day. “He only ever hurt you and Billy.”

“I never should have married him,” Susan says.

They don’t leave town. Susan wants to, but Neil took most of their savings and the house is hers because her job payed more than his. So she stays. 

It takes Max more courage to walk into school, a week after it happened, than it took her to jab a needle into Billy’s neck.

She’s wearing Billy’s leather jacket and his necklace. She’s hoping that no one will fuck with her if she channels her dead stepbrother hard enough.

The first person who asks her if Neil killed Billy gets kneed in the nuts. She doesn’t even get called to the principal’s office.

Lucas cheers.

She takes him to meet her mom, a few weeks later. Her mom is nice to him. She knows the Sinclairs, after all. 

They burn all the clothes he made her wear on a bonfire that summer.

Will helps her pick out new ones.

El offers to try finding Neil even if her powers are still on the fritz. Max turns her down.

She experiments with touching Lucas, waits until she feels safe dragging her fingers up his naked sides, over his chest, before she lets him do the same.

She gets so mad at him the first time he makes a dumb joke while she’s naked that she pulls on all her clothes and storms off.

He calls her later and tells her he loves her.


End file.
